SEO dilemma potentially overlooked...?

I am recently revamping my site to fully optimize and came across something that I thought rather interesting. I am aware of the black hat techniques that users may use to hide the same color text as the background however what if your using lets say white text on a background image and your background behind the image is also set to white? How do search engines know what color background image you are using?... or is it a good idea to stick with a text thats not the same color as the background in general even though the background image is a different color? Thoughts?

May work fine until your competator notices and reports you to SEs for spam and get you banned.......

Its not necessary to taste the venom for verifying the lethality of a snake, is it? You would be better off keeping all this out of your mind and taking the better route, the white hat route.

And finally its always better to consider yourself smart, but not smart enough to outsmart the Search Engines!

Posting it here gives your sneaky competitors ideas.

But, images are nothing more then a file full of numbers and search engines are able to tell a lot from those images. Even text on an image file can be read if they want to (and I do believe that this is done).